An Open Letter To The Subway Franchise

Dear Mr and Mrs Subway,

I am afraid that this letter is a complaint. It was an event during my commute home that has compelled me to place pen to paper and bear this letter as one would an unwanted child left outside a hospital, and it saddens me so to see it here on the page, only now in its very first sentences but indicating a difficult life to come whose very inception indicates the universal sadness felt towards all of human nature that this very event has happened.

I am not, alas, a man who regularly frequents your franchises, but this had been a particularly torrid Monday and I required a considerable snack on my journey home to alleviate some of the ennui that the grind of a teacher's life had imbued me with at this time. As I wandered chartered streets I passed a number of other stores and found myself, eventually (and after a number of rejections even after entering the glossy doors of another eatery before dispensing with its services rapidly as being not up to my desires) at the gleaming, semi-reflective glass of your sandwich provider. And this was where my troubling experience began.

Perhaps my expectations were too high for an overcast late afternoon, but I see the creation of a sandwich as the creation of a work of art: the bread is the canvas; the topping is the paint and the sauce, oh the sauce, is the very signature; applied as it should be with a smile and a flourish. Now, although the breaded delicacy at the heart of this analogy is important, what is more important, nay, essential, is the artiste that creates the wax-paper wrapped masterpiece of culinary perfection.

My sandwich artiste was no more proficient in artistry than I am, and I can assure you that the most exciting art I create on a daily basis is quickly flushed away.

I will further explain the iconoclastic process that took place: I opted from the laminated board of water that hung above my head with all the promise of heaven for a foot-long meatball marinara. A full foot of meatballs in tomato sauce wrapped in my choice of bread from the, frankly mystifyingly eternally unblemished by mould, bread selection display. So there it was, I would receive, if everything were to progress on task, (which I can imagine, my reader, you know it would not) Nearly 30cms of steaming hot meaty balls on thick, doughy bread. My heart skipped a beat and the prospect of the sheer beauty of it. The bread was cut, haphazardly but forgiveably so, in front of me. I was stood waiting, salivating like one of Pavlov's unfortunate canines, for the ladlefuls of meaty orbs and rich sauce when my world was shattered by a voice with so little compassion that I thought it a joke at first. I was disarmed, thoroughly, by it: 'No Meatballs.' it said. To think upon it now is to return to a dark place.
'No. Meatballs.'
'NO. MEATBALLS.'
Not 'I'm terribly sorry Sir or Madam but I'm afraid we are out of our delicious meatballs for today, would you like me to suggest an alternative from our diverse menu.'
No. There was not that. There was only 'No Meatballs.'
I am a simple man, Mr and Mrs Subway. I lead a simple life and I believe in honesty. You promised me that I could have my sandwich my way. That promise was broken but, being a simple man, I chose there and then, to allow your franchise the second chance that I myself would like to have received. I selected the substantially less saucy, but no less meaty, Italian BMT. In order to help relinquish the earlier disappointment I opted for the enhancement: Double cheese. (Enhancement: Toasted is such an ubiquitous option that I feel it warrants little further comment than this acknowledgment.) I should intercede here to mention my love of cheese. I don't know who first event cheese and what they thought that they were up to at the time, but I am thankful every day for there apparent deviancy. This unhealthy obsession may explain my aghast horror at the mistreatment of the little triangles of celestial manna by the hands of what can only be described at this time as the daughter of Lucifer himself. The cheese was flung. Yes, I can almost hear your gasps reach me across the aether, my dearest reader, flung. The disrespect of it. Cheese flung haphazardly by someone for whom the words sandwich artiste are now merely a sobriquet and not the honorific title that they should be. I have seen more care taken with dog food than that which stunned me as perfectly tessellating triangles of cheese were left overlapping both each other and the edges of the bread. My mouth refused to close, so shocked it was, as the sandwich was nearly thrown into the high-speed oven. (this, I must infer, is a grand invention, however.)

And then she walked off.

In the thirty-four seconds it took for my sandwich to receive a grilling sterner than a twelve-year old miscreant receives from an angry teacher, my sandwich attendant disappeared. I was stood, alone at last, alone and aghast. Where was the friendly banter? Where was the 'how is your day?' or 'Nice weather last weekend.' I do not expect a treatise on Nietzsche delivered for my education but I feel that when you pass over more than a small note for a sandwich then you should have enjoyed some sort of experience. A sandwich of any repute should come, in my opinion, with two things: High cholesterol and a smile, and mine seemed to believe that having the former in abundance negated the latter. How very wrong this is.

I dreaded the reappearance of the sandwich. (the pronoun here is entirely justified. This was not my sandwich. This was so far from being my sandwich that it was like looking at your first born child and realising that they look awfully like the postman.) I wished the high-speed grill would not beep because I knew that when it did the horrors would not stop and the horror awaiting it in plastic tubs and plastic gloves was that of optional salad distribution. My fragile little mind, however, could not contemplate the massacre that was to come. It was a sort of salad genocide where only very few items made the cut and even those seemed pretty traumatised.

I asked for a simple list: Cucumber, lettuce, jalapenos, sweetcorn, gherkins and olives. The amount I received of each of these could have appeased only the most anorexic and weight-conscious of gerbils. I received, in total, six slices of gherkin. Imagine that in your mind if you will. It is piteous and I believe you know that. It is not even half a gherkin. Probably not a quarter. This is not the eating fresh that your advertising campaign attests to Mr and Mrs Subway. A tear graces my eye as I consider it. Then came the final indignity of sauce. Without the Marinara that would have constituted their eponymous filling option there would need to be significant saucing. I chose southwest and a stripe of hot chilli and in my mind the two combined with all the beauty and grace of a wild zebra. My mind was torn when the greatest of sins was committed: With both sauces the stripes were not contained to the limits of the bread; they extended beyond their bready target and onto the wax paper. They were wrapped so quickly that I could not register an objection and as I paid and left I had an ominous taste in my mouth for I knew that there were hideous ramifications of what should have been internal to my 'sub' becoming external.

By the time I had boarded my train I had, to eat, a sandwich where the ends of the bread had been permeated entirely by the sauce of disappointment. What coated my hands however, was not just sauce but indignity. I felt as if my sandwich experience had been, and i hesitate to use the word here, raped. I felt violated by the careless attitude of your workers.

Now, Mr and Mrs Subway, I am a teacher. It used to be a noble profession but over time it has simply come to represent the growing bureaucracy of our society. Gone are the days of the charismatic teacher who goes the extra mile and in are the days of the piteous bean-counter only out to ply their bosses with numbers and figures, constantly in fear of 'doing something wrong'. This, however is an aside. I take pride in my job and I take particular care in the standards I expect of my students. I insist that they are well turned out and that they, themselves, take pride and care in everything that they do. They berate me for this at times. They call me old-fashioned and I tell them that my advice may harken from a different age but that if they take pride they will go far in life. With this in mind Mr and Mrs Subway I ask you this: How can I expect these students to go into the world with pride and their heads held high when in your franchise a worker cannot even take the time to chat a few words with a customer? Or take the care required to finish a sandwich in a manner that provides an engaging and consistent taste experience? I am deflated by the very experience that I was the victim of because is demolishes the pillars that I encourage my students to climb. I can no longer teach them standards with any level of conviction in the knowledge that they may visit one of your franchises on their way home and receive the same service and believe, in lieu of anything better, that six slices of gherkin are acceptable in a sandwich measuring, more or less, a foot. You are stamping on our work as educators and you are doing it without any style at that.

I am saddened to be writing this rebuke but I feel it is time for me to stand up for what I believe in and that is responsibility, pride and care. And if those three factors can't be found in the food service industry then I don't know where they can be found any more. If sandwich making has no integrity left then I don't know what there is left in this world to believe in. I guess there is nothing left.

I hope you have a nice day Mr and Mrs Subway, and I hope your next lunch experience is more fulfilling than mine.

thank you,

Calamity Teacher. 

Stop it. Just stop it.

My favourite days of the year are those that are really horrible because they give so much ammunition for this blog. I was worried a few weeks ago that I had writers block and that maybe my streak of acidic, acerbic, caustic and other -ics was at an inglorious end. Thankfully, or unthankfully, this block has ended with an abrupt lurch because yesterday I was exposed to a presentation that was so utterly full of things I hate that at one point I looked around to find the hidden camera. In my mind I sort of hope that it was all a big test and that we're all going to be berated for not going to town on the flaws in it. At least in that I would be assured that education has some sort of morality/scruples/integrity/anything, anything at all.

What stood up in front of us on some grimy afternoon in late April was a salesperson, and there is utterly no doubt about that. The thing is, is that she had already sold the product and we were forced to sit there and listen to a service being described to us that had already cost our school money and was also useless as only a bad INSET can be. Most of the teachers sat in utter shock as what was explained to us was that the school had bought a resource that was an internet dictionary which, surprise surprise, is actually already available free. On the internet.

Consternation abound, there was time for questions, and questions came. Some of the teachers, unlike most of our little darling students, had done their homework. One Science teacher had looked at the word lists and oh was she not happy. There were, simply, not enough words, and what were we told? To submit any that were missing. Shock and awe were more abound than an attempt to stamp communism out of the north of a split country. Or something. So we have bought a resource that isn't actually finished. We have purchased a service that as its marquee product is a big tent full of absolutely nothing and what we are meant to do is take a look inside and throw shit in it for the company to use themselves by selling it to others. This is not a community of learners; this is a collection of self-indulgent dickheads taking the piss out of schools and getting away with it because schools buy this crap. And what will they do with our contributions? We were told, and I believe this is verbatim, that

'We even have a teacher in head office to define and categorise the words.'

'A teacher,' I thought, looking around the room, 'A teacher?' silence. 'Well, Well done mate, you have a teacher? We've got absolutely loads of them. Look at them. Count them. Bloody loads of them.' I was as incensed as incense. I was watching someone effectively tell me that the entire room's collective subject knowledge and learning ability were made drastically obselete by one teacher in a London office with a dictionary and a vapid penchant for the highlight button.

Included as part of the all-encompassing service, and here I use the word service as one might use it to describe that provided by an STI-ridden hooker, LSAs are trained to deliver the companies own particular brand of reconstituted crap to students in an intensive six-week cycle. They showed us results and then I thought to myself if you by-passed this company and added the money to budgets and staffing and developed this system in-house then we would get exactly the same results and we would have an enduring system we could be proud of. And that's it, isn't it? Schools are bought by glossy brochures because they have no faith in their own staff's ability. Teachers are overstretched because budgets are tight but if this money spent on outside agencies was turned internally and spent on overstaffing then maybe staff would be able to execute this sort of thing. It escapes me why schools are taken in by the glistening brochure of a third party. There is no magic bullet. Schools are so desperate for results that they have no faith in their own staff. There is a horrendous tacit implication that staff are doing a bad job and I don't think a lot of senior management realise this. They see that the stats are not befitting of their brogues and they throw money at a situation to make it better. They look for the quick fix. There is no quick fix. Just a quick way to disgruntled staff and wasted budgets.

If there are any members of senior leadership reading this then please heed my message: Stop spending money on this shit. Spend the money on overstaffing and supporting the departments that belong to you. Show your faith in your staff by giving them what they need; time. They are good at what they do. Help them develop in order to help students develop by giving them the time to, well, develop. Yesterday I saw two useless systems costing twelve grand in total. That is a part time teacher or LSA. That part-timer or LSA could ease the pressure and give teachers the time to develop the systems that these companies charge a premium to deliver badly. Half of the crap that educational companies peddle is just recycled chaff under different branding completely intended to sell short and exploit. A massive slice of the money that schools pay them is shoveled straight into branding, marketing, shareholders, offices, bonuses and yet we are more than happy to pay for all this instead of losing these add-ons by working the budgets internally. Instead of paying for someone's business lunch with a prospective client from another school why not give your staff the flexibility and time to be revolutionary? Why not encourage your staff to innovate and facilitate this with working groups that have time to actually work. And you know what? Maybe you can sell your own programmes that you've developed in house to others and thereby fund your own excesses. I dunno, use the profits to take your whole school to Alton Towers or some such shit. It's probably about as useful as half the crap you buy.

As an endpoint for my frustrations perhaps this might illustrate to people what this is really about: Do you know what normal teachers do when they go on strike? Most of them don't go out and hold up banners. Most of them sit at home and they plan lessons and mark work. Doesn't that tell you something? I don't need resources to do my job better. I have myself and my department and coworkers and twitter for that. I need time.

Postcript Edit: Although I thought this article finished, I can't help but feel that something else should be mentioned. It was clear that this new system was unpopular with staff so this morning another little presentation was arranged by the member of SLT who is in charge of it. During this the staff assembled were presented with vastly overinflated data about the effectiveness of the scheme that even lied, clearly and obviously, about the reading ages of some students. I still feel genuinely sick about this. Even if they were just tested with a flawed test it is so obvious that these reading ages were wrong that it would take a rank idiot to not notice. If this is education...

The Moment When You Realise It's All Out Of Control.

So there I was, holding exalted court upon the class of bright-eyed and impeccably engaged year nines and delivering to them a beautiful sermon of learning that was both student-led and teacher facilitated. The lesson that kept them so enraptured was both meticulously planned and evolved through the lesson in a free and organic way driven, equally, by every single student in the classroom. So what should happen to this calm eutopia (which is a word, incidentally) of learning, there was, and in some ways, deep in my mind, a knock at the door. I beckoned, reluctantly, a small and nervous looking year seven into the class room.

A deviation: This child is one of those children who you have no choice but to believe anything that they say, at least for the first eight or ten times that they lie to you. On of those students that not only has one of those faces, but also knows that they have this in their possession and seeks intuitively to exploit this at every turn. In your mind you probably can think of a student that fills this template and the many times that they have sought to deceive you with only their innocent smile and enrapturing eyes. You are probably also cursing. This may be important to the story. It may also not.

The oasis of calm shattered indefinitely, I turned to the child and asked them, in my most annoyed tone, what the problem was, or what she needed, or what her exact purpose was in breaking the beautiful stained glass of learning that was being created in my classroom.

A deviation: There may well be some exaggeration in parts of this story yet I assure you that the important bits are true.

She had panic in her eyes and a mere few words escaped her mouth like dying embers thrown up into the dark night surrounding a campfire.

'I think Tina has passed out Sir.'

Now, quite apart from the fact I had no idea who Tina was or what in any deity's name was going on there is one fact that fills the core of every teaching day and is consistently ignored by pretty much everyone; We simply aren't trained for this sort of shit. Since the council declared that any child of mine would be disposed of without remorse lest the insanity spread I have no real parenting instinct. I only know that when a scared little kid walks into your classroom and tells you that then you just do what you know you should without thinking. So I went around the corner and saw the kid lying on the floor. So again, I didn't think, I just did. I told the scared little girl to go and get the most senior and first teacher she could find, and I stayed with the girl and bring her round.

I would later find out that the girl was a known epileptic and that it was all pretty standard and, to be totally fair, I do have a history of looking after epileptics (sort of) so it wasn't as panicky for me as it may have been for others but, when the other staff got there and starting sorting things out I simply returned to the class that I had told the words immemorial of 'Talk amongst yourselves', told them that it was all okay as I shrugged nonchalantly and continued with the lesson. That was it. Incident over.

Later, much later, but still the same day and in the relative comfort of the staff room a teacher came up to me and said to me something along the lines of  'I hear you were up to some heroics earlier?' I didn't know what they were talking about. I had to ask. 'Oh, I heard that Tina had had a seizure.' 'Oh yeah', I said. Thinking nothing of it because it's our job, isn't it. It's what we do. We just do things, regardless of anything else we just do what we have to. We're not an emergency service, or the military, or anyone who could rightly be a hero, but we just get stuff done when it has to be done and when it has to be done we do it with utter confidence regardless of all the little tugging daemons inside of us rattling our hearts like babies' toys and prodding something very sharp and confusing into our brains. I don't think there are many teachers that would have done anything different to me.because I didn't do, well, anything. I did my job, you all do your jobs every day. I don't want a ribbon or a medal or a road named after me, I just want kids to know that it's all going to be okay to the best of our abilities should anything ever go wrong.

The Fear of Falling.

Throughout my life I have been one of those people that, somewhat annoyingly for others, will try something regardless of how terrible I am likely to be at it. I will now anecdote (and yes can I use anecdote as a verb. I teach English and can word in any way I like. (See, there you go. I did it again. Different word worded differently.))

Anyway, To anecdote...

I did PE A Level. Stigma aside, I found it difficult. It was very cross-curricular, and it taught me more about psychology, in many ways, than my Psychology A Level did. For PE there was a moderation day. I was to be moderated in my second sport: Rounders. (Don't ask, but, in summary, I was very good at one sport and it didn't afford me much time to do another. The sport picked as the token second sport for me was rounders.)

When we arrived at the moderation day rounders was at the end. First there was football. They were, however, short one goalkeeper. I volunteered. I can barely save money in a sale let alone goals. Somehow (good defenders, most likely) I kept a clean sheet. This is not, however, about my Gordon Banks impression. It is about its reception by a child from another school who I had met (read 'was flirting with') at the moderation.They told me that they would never have volunteered. That they'd be too worried about making a fool of themselves. I was awestruck in the bad way. Who, my eighteen-year-old mind wondered, wouldn't just give something a go? Perhaps I was bought up in a way that embraced giving stuff a go, or perhaps I have just always been that way regardless, but it was always confused me, the attitude of fear of doing things. The most confusing part of this avoidance action is that I have always thought the fear was simply a part of life, and a positive thing. At the time of the aforementioned moderation I was competing nationally (not in rounders or football) and shaking before every race. This is still true of lastMonday morning, when I delivered an assembly and was physically shaking before I began. I've always thought that fear was part of difficult actions. Difficult actions are rewarding ergo fear is a good thing.(this is a bit of a false conclusion, but it has always worked for me.)

Yesterday I was reminded of that student at the football moderation when a student said to me that she would rather refuse to stand up to do a speaking and listening assessment and therefore fail than stand up in front of other students and potentially do badly. I was shocked. I called my head of department and we both quizzed the girl after the lesson. She had her mind totally set on not trying. But it wasn't not trying, not really. She had actually written the speaking and listening presentation. She had written the whole thing out verbatim in fact. This presented a difficulty in that full speeches are expressly forbidden by the regulations. So she was told to reduce her speech to notes and then she could go.

She refused. Twice. On consecutive days. She just didn't want to stand up in front of people and risk doing badly despite the tacit acceptance of failing by not doing anything. It mystified me and mystified my head of department so much that we started grilling her a bit. We asked her about her options for GCSE and they turned out to all be coursework based subjects; in other words, the sort of things you can keep redoing. She had even dropped PE half way through the year after ending up in a class with, in her words, 'loads of really clever kids'. I was dumbstruck that this student had not been noticed as a cause for concern at any point before. How had we missed a student whose confidence in herself was so low that she was avoiding situations where she could be exposed in any matter? But aside from our failings pastorally there was another nagging question in that annoying itchy bit at the back of my head, and I don't even mean the bit with the questionable rash. That question: What have we done to this girl?

The major difficulty with the itching, nagging question was the identification of who I actually meant when I used the pronoun. I knew that I was certainly part of the culpable 'we' but who was I lumping myself in with. The teachers? The school? All of education? X-Factor? Sadly, and annoyingly, the last one is likely to be true to an extent. Perhaps the show itself is not guilty per se but it is representative of a element of the society whose progeny we nurture.

My feeling is that we are part of a youth culture that sees itself in terms of a dichotomy of performer and observer. Students see those who perform as being either exceptionally good or exceptionally bad and both come with inherent problems. Being good leads to the depravity of quick young fame and being bad leads to ridicule. Not a day goes by that there is not a video on the internet of someone doing badly at something and receiving the full force of mob disgust. It even happened at my school. A girl posted a video of herself singing on youtube and it went viral around the school for all the wrong reasons. She crossed the void between observer and performer, risked judgement, and saw it rain down upon her. She is either resilient to the point of being metallic or oblivious to the point of being wooden. I still can't quite decide. 

I think that this fear is ingrained into students and it makes them fear the judgement more than the act. The student that I was so shocked by is afraid enough of judgement that it is safer simply not to take part despite its inherent failure. They wish to remain behind the glass screen at all costs and never expose themselves because it is safe but it also overcomes any aspiration. Students are culturally indoctrinated into believing in the glass ceiling as opposed to trying to break it. So they just sit, and stare, and never believe.

Strangely, this creates quite the opposite effect on some other students who believe that things will simply come their way without work. This attitude seems to be a sort of glass slipper syndrome where they just think everything will be okay because it will all work out. I find this particular attitude most prevalent, somewhat inappropriately, among the young boys who believe they are the next David Beckham, forgetting, of course, that in order to be a great footballer you actually have to practice playing football. Instead, most of them play a bit of football for the school and their aspiration is not to be an excellent footballer, rather to have the accoutrements of booted fame; a model wife, wheelbarrows of money and pure, innocent idolatry. But perhaps this entrenches further my theory. Students either believe they are destined to be spectators or that they should automatically belong on the pitch, stage or ring. There is no middle ground and, for most, no idea of what the concept of hard work entails or solves.

I will finish with this:

A student this week asked me why rappers were so good at rapping when most of them didn't finish school. I told them that there are things that can't be taught but have to be actively learned. The only way to ensure you get what you want is to go and get it, I told him, and then it still might not happen. He seemed shocked at this.

The Secret Anguishes Of Being A Teacher or Other Reasons To Strike

It's a hard life being a teacher, but not just because of the working hours. On a daily basis there are a mass of unintentional, and rather unexpected, anguishes that may be ignored by the prospective learning facilitator. If you are a member of the Freemasons NUT and you can't remember what you're meant to be striking about, maybe you can consider some of these option:

1) Resisting squeezing a student's particularly juicy blackhead or spot.
2) Oh God I need the loo but it's the middle of a double period.
3) I've forgotten your name despite teaching you for years.
4) Outside of school awkward student encounter.
5) 'My dad says that science is a lie.'
6) 'Some people believe that...'
7) It's a bonus boring assembly!
8) Friday afternoon, nearly out the door, 'Sir can I just talk to you for a second...'
9) STAFF MEETING
10) The conundrum of 'How ill am I?' versus 'Teaching is Easier Than Setting Cover.'
11) Oh crap, What is that LSA called again?
12) I have no idea what I taught this class last lesson...
13) 'Miss? Do you think I can get a C?' 'Errrrr..'
14) Awkward corridor conversation with the head.
15) I really need to fart. Now. Which student can I fart behind and blame it on.
16) How long have my flies been undone?
17) Observing another teacher and being on the verge of falling asleep.
18) Meeting an ex-student you worked really hard with and receiving the answer to the question of 'what are you doing now' with 'oh, y'know, I work at Tesco's/the chippy/pub/brothel greeter.'
19) Pretending to students that you are striking for ethical reasons instead of a midweek lie-in.
20) The first day back. That is all. 
21) Unproductive planning time guilt
22) How am I meant to teach hungover? this is unethical. I should not be expected to work in these conditions.
23) Having to have a chat about hygiene with a student.

One day my educational version of Monopoly will finally see the print it deserves, or maybe Fantasy Flight will accept my design for a collectable teaching card game, and when either of these things happen then these will certainly be included as hazards for somewhat hapless player to avoid. (If you're reading, @FFgames I think you need to check your junk emails. My submission must be in there somewhere and you can't miss this. It's off the chain.)

Another 'Inspirational' assembly.

They keep asking me to give assemblies to the 'top end'. This is part of, interestingly, someone's whole school project. last time I did it the result was this. This time I thought I'd go for high levels of concept. Mostly to amuse myself. We'll see how this one rolls on Monday.

I would like to welcome you

To what it is I’m going to do

Which is, not really, to convince

You to be princess or prince

Or even to be king or queen

But instead be something that’s never been

Transcend any expectation

Through brutal, honest, perspiration

For you are all of mental fame

Exceptional at the mental game

That we refer to as education

So let us with no consternation

Debate upon the point of this

Box in which we do persist

To fill your mind with useless drivel

From mathmatic’s graphs to DT’s swivel

Because what we do in here is tough

But, for you, not tough enough,

Because you, you apparently special few

Who it would seem don’t know what to do

To push forward your impressive learning

So now to satiate your yearning

I come here to cram your little brains,

Not with numbers, not with names

But instead an idea of working ethic

So that you’ll avoid pathetic

Attitudes to your every fleeting day

When it’s simply far too easy to say

“yeah that’s fine” and let it be

And have for dinner your mundane C

And let the moment pass you by

Instead staring lovingly at the guy

Or girl who sits across from you and ponder

On a weekend, own-clothes wander

The nervous invitation to the park

Or the hope of a cinema kiss in the dark

And then one day “lessons, I remember those”

Twenty years ago I chose

To hide from English in the loo

Because I thought it the thing to do

But now year, 7,8 and this is true,

There is an unbelievable world for you.

And, when your older,

You’ll be bolder,

In declaring your regret

And you’ll forget

The window-gazing double french

As with a sickening wrench

You’ll realise school is gone forever

And despite the lump in throat you’ll never

Ever be in this box again

Jour de jour semaine après semaine

Dripping through your fingers

Perhaps right now your boredom lingers

And so perhaps some clarity

Of this strangest of assemblies

And why then this poetic rant

A simple one: there is no can’t

There is just can’t yet, I will one day,

That is what driven students say.

Because For the amazing, failure is no fear

They hunt it down, they grasp its ear

And ride it bravely through the dark

With fire in eyes and primal bark

And spur it to jump higher walls

And accept, consistent, painful falls

But know that sets of brushed down clothes

Raise them higher above all those

That never tried to jump at all

Those people who find their destined fall

In jobs they didn’t want at all

And hope to find an out at a midnight ball

While, elsewhere, the failures brave and true,

Attempt more than is easy to do

And prosper and, critically, have fun

And realise that life isn’t won

It’s a game played on an endless board

And played by all of humanity’s hoard

A game of difficulty where you’re the piece

That shuffles slowly til deceased

Where winning is a terrible lie

Told by those who just get by

And pray in the churches of lotteries

And x-factor heroes and flat-screen tv’s

Because success is not a letter

It’s not money, or exams, it’s being better

And better still and never content

With anything on which your effort is spent

It’s reaching far beyond your reach

It’s the willingness to teach

Yourself the things you want to know

It’s a constant burning desire to go

Beyond what’s in the range of your hand

To go where things aren’t planned

Because you are flicking unmade switches

Instead of passing out in ditches

Because you bothered, because you care

Beyond simply what you’re going to wear

Or what they look like, what looks good

The things you like because you should

Pursue everything you want whatever it may be

And then the naysayers will see

That everything you have done

Is beautiful.

So perhaps, I guess you’re wondering why the poetics

I mean, isn’t it all a bit pathetic

It all depends on your outlook

And the notice of my words you took

As I ranted words that just might rhyme

And you begrudged the waste of your time

The point is that it isn’t quick

To write in couplets, there’s no trick

Except hard work and lonely grit

And a desire to get on with it

And really it’s a stupid idea

At which others might scoff and sneer

But I simply do not care

I’m only bothered how I fare

At my self-set, absurd task

And at it’s end it’s me I’ll ask

How much better it could be

It’s progress that interests me

For as long as I perceive my skull as hollow

I’ll find information to swallow

Despite the knowledge that I’ll never be quite filled

It doesn’t matter at all, I’m strong willed.

I’m sorry, I’ve digressed as usual

And so as not to confuddle you all

I will summarise

My lengthy, rambling surmise.

I wrote this.

And this and all of this

And so my fragile coup de grace

Is that every moment is just fragile glass

So Quit Your Worrying

And instead enjoy the scurrying

Passage of not knowing everything

But trying to. And the joy

Of making all of life your toy

As you find the beautiful wonder

Of the freeing, magical splendour

Of this vast, mysterious, land

Because for you there’s nothing planned

You are free. No linear storyline

No certain future, it’s all fine

You are the heirs to everything you touch

And there is nothing in the world too much

For you to handle, if you bother

To fill a day, then fill another

With all that you can bring to living

And never stop intellectually giving

To yourself, and those around

Do not be afraid of the loud sound

Of trying to do everything that can be done

Your silence doesn’t serve anyone

So upturn mountains, paint the sun

Create worlds, reinvent fun,

Splitting the atom is so passé

Compared to what wonders may come your way.

You own this little bildungsroman

So make it as giant as you can

One moment, sorry, while I interject,

There is at work a slight subject

That may come across as arrogant,

But I assure you it is relevant,

It is the topic of my deepest fear

And that is that I’m simply dying here

I don’t mean that I fear if my health is fine

I’m sorry, I have to borrow a singer’s line

To describe the midnight-waking fear

That “I’m not really here’

My fear is I will waste all this

And that it won’t matter if I did not exist

As far as I know I have one life

One shot at this so full of strife

But for the fragility I’ll not worry

And I’ll walk through in no hurry

Because this world is more than enough

Isn’t it okay to believe that, well, stuff,

Is worth our exploration?

Our fascination? Our delectable, devour, er, ation?

That there is simply enough here to see

To drink in for one eternity?

That we as fleeting people exist

In just a blink of this world’s iris

And that fraction of a slice of time

Is ours, it’s what is yours, it’s mine

And so why, why? When surrounded by such amazement

Do some insist on being sofa’d and stagnant

Why do we insist on letting moment’s fetter

When you could free them for something better

Live. LIVE for no one but yourself

Live because some ill health

Could strike you in the dead of night

And snuff out what sits here, wonderful and bright

Please understand I don’t aim to fear

I’m merely trying to press on you what’s dear

And what should be dear to you

Is. YOU. Your dreams, and to them being true.

And there you are, alone at last,

With heart and volume falling fast.

So turn it up. Embrace your skill.

And tell the world you’ll never. Never. Have your fill.

I'd rather be a teacher than hate myself.

I have sat through an increasing number of briefings and meetings and strategy groups and focus units and coffee mornings and informal chats and other such bollocks over the past few weeks that have started to show a dangerous trend in my school. This horrifying trend is that of the bureaucracy of teaching's upper-middle-management. These (and I hesitate here to use the word) teachers are part of the increasingly middle-heavy structure that needs to constantly affirm its own existence by the use of sophistry-laden presentations dripping with data and spreadsheets and 'visual strategy' and online resources that do absolutely nothing for teaching apart from making things that teachers already do needlessly convoluted, all wrapped up with the insistent deployment of the word 'tracking'.

There is no denying that education is a business. I have spoken about this before and it was, I hope, abundantly clear that my feelings upon this are not wholly positive. I do, however, understand that it would be naive to think that people do not want to have careers in education. For many achievement is rooted in the belief that they must aspire and perspire their way through strings and strings of data in order to progress through the mess of payscales and that by progressing through this they are instantly a success. The aspiration culture of twenty-first century western society is one which is inherently selfish. It is obsessed with numbers on e-pay slips and epithets of rank; head of, director for, specialist in. I don't really care that people want to earn more. I think we'd all like to earn more. It is the effect on the quality of education that is to my chagrin. What I am seeing is that the press of careerism is actually making teaching worse. It is making the lives of teachers harder and, what is worse, it is putting into higher positions those who manipulate others to compensate for their own lack of talent and passion.

My problem is with the obsession with the whole school project. This seems to be as popular with aspirational leadership candidates as class-A drugs are with hookers. And is equally as destructive. Suddenly, without any training or knowledge or, really, interest, Maths teachers are leading literacy, Linguists are developing Art for All and God knows who is leading SMSC. But surely, I hear from your hoary throats, any work on these key areas of development are valuable. Surely even the focus on them is as good as anything. Well. Sorry (I'm not sorry.) it's not. It is tokenism based purely on an aspiration that ignores the point of a whole school project. A whole school project should lead and develop. If this is so then why are there five different whole school literacy directives going on in my school? And, more importantly, why do none of them work together? It is less a case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing and more of the right hand writing down nonsense while the left hand erases what has just been written.

It is at the very core of being a teacher that you should be interested in your subject, but most of the people running these programmes are not interested in anything beyond their own paychecks. The whole-school project is needless sophistry run on false enthusiasm. This week a teacher started a debating club and called it the first debating club the school has ever had, despite the literacy club that has run for the last eighteen months and has run debates as part of it, or the debating club that ran years before but died due, partly, to a lack of leadership support. And why does this teacher not realise that they are not the first? Because they don't give a shit about debating. They are more than happy to ignore the work done by a normal teacher in order to further themselves. They have the gift of the upper pay scale and its inherent access to resources, people, publicity and the ability to wonder around school promoting while most other teachers are taking registers or, Gove forbid, teaching.

Teaching doesn't want the Dead Poets Society style of teacher. (in terms of teen suicide rate, that is probably a good thing though.) It doesn't want the exciting, interesting and knowledgeable teacher who loves their subject and loves teaching it and shows signs of a number of mild mental disorders. Teaching wants the grinder. It wants the worksheet-laden, numbers in boxes teacher who has career ambitions and uses the lexicon of the middle-manager. I don't get it. I would rather teach, would rather try my hardest to impart a love of my subject through my passion. I would rather be paid an average wage and be honest than do something I don't care about and manipulate students and other staff to make myself appear better.

I will leave you with a pipe dream as hopeless as my script for Mighty Ducks 4 (Duck University) ever making it to production:

I want to work in a school where every teacher has time allocated with which they have to pursue a project of their own. The caveat: that this project should be in subject (at least vaguely) and of their own interest. An art teacher could produce a sculpture for instance; a Geography teacher, a study of erosion or oxbow lakes (or any other available stereotype); An English teacher a study of literature or a piece of creative writing. Every year the school would publish a yearbook of these projects. Can you imagine a school screaming with pursuit of knowledge? Students would be encouraged to join in themselves if they wanted to, but the profound idea underpinning this is that the school would be alive with modeled learning and development of what teaching is.

I don't know. Maybe I don't really get teaching after all. Maybe I was sold a profession that doesn't exist. Maybe I'm just a bit rubbish really.

You can achieve your potential.

A while ago I was asked to deliver an assembly to a group of 'High Achievers' in years nine, ten and eleven. I was to talk to them about achieving their potential. I could not think about a subject more full of rubbish than this particular one.

I decided long ago that, to the best of my ability, I would not lie to students that I teach. I would try my hardest to tell them the truth, or at the very least I would be honest to myself; that I would not tell them anything that I was not proud of or believed in.

I therefore approached the task of talking about the ethereal concept of potential, something that I fundamentally do not agree with, with all the enthusiasm of a slug at an all you can eat chinese buffet. So I decided to be true to myself. I decided to be as true as I could be. I present you with a transcript written from my notes for the assembly. Now, obviously, this may not be exactly what I said because the nature of public speaking is, of course, transient in its delivery and application. I will do my best to recreate what I said from a scrawl of red-penned wonder.

"Students, I am here today at the invitation of Mrs. Bun the Baker's Wife to talk to you about achieving your potential.

It is a lie.

You cannot achieve your potential because your potential is a lie.

You are not destined for anything beyond that which you work for.

I am here because I am told that you are all the highest achievers in the school.

In all truth you are probably here because you have a small genetic mutation that causes you to think in a slightly different way to others of your age. This, apparently, is your potential.

This does not mean you are destined for greatness.

This does not mean that you will succeed.

The only factor that controls how high you can achieve is how hard you work.

Sadly, the school cannot help you enough. Your teachers cannot help you enough. If we, as a school, were to take one hundred students and only teach them alone and teach them as well as we possibly could then we would still not achieve all A*s because, in the end, some of them would lack the ability and some wouldn't work hard enough.

You have the ability.

Unfortunately, no-one in the real world expects you to be anything other than another husk of a person slowly paling into insignificance as you wait behind the counter, or desk, or forecourt of another dead end job waiting to either have children, or die, or have children and die.

This means, perversely, that you are totally free.

You are free to do what you want to do, and most importanly you are totally free to fail.

You should never be afraid to fail because it is only through failure that you will ever succeed at anything. Failure is good. It is how you learn. If you want to be incredible you must welcome failure with open arms. You must walk with failure into the darkness.

This may sound strange but you should actively seek out failure. Do this by by attempting things that are too difficult. The exceptional student will bother to hunt out things that are difficult because they  enjoy the pursuit of knowledge and the process. They see success not as a goal hanging in front of them. They see it not as something that can be achieved; they see it as a continuing journey. A mission. Success is not a moment. It is not a letter on a piece of paper, or a pay packet, or a brand new TV. Success is a lifetime. If you want to codify success into a single moment then it is the last moment you live. It is a smile on your face on a hospital bed, surrounded by your loved ones. It is in that moment when you look back and see all the things that you did, or tried to do and you smile and think 'I did pretty well there'.

That lifetime, for better or worse, that continuing mission starts, predominantly, now.

The next three years, give or take, will decide which doors open up to you and which never can. 

Let me give you an example: I will tell you a story about a friend of mine. He was not a great academic. He did not do exceptionally well at his GCSEs, in fact he just about scraped his way into the sixth form at school but he decided, after nearly failing his AS levels, that he had a reason to do things. He wanted to become a Doctor. A fairly inauspicious start for such a difficult profession. So, he retook. He retook everything. He fought his way through every moment to do the things that he had failed at the first time correctly the second time. He did not get onto medicine at university but he had pulled his grades up high enough to give himself the chance. My friends and I did not see him, pretty much, for the next year because he did everything he could. He volunteered, he studied, he barely slept, and he got onto a course. Not the course, but a course and he jumped from that course to the one he wanted because he worked. He clutched every opportunity and went for it. Within a few years he was top of his class. Last year he got invited to travel abroad on a summer programme to study brains. He will be, i have no doubt, a top neurosurgeon in a few years time. Why? Because he failed, he learned, and he worked hard for what he wanted. 

One of the major reasons that this friend did well is because he wanted to do this. He wanted it and he enjoyed it. He did something that interested him. How many of you, honestly, go out and find things out about the world around you because it interests you? I am a little bit notorious in this school for having an exceptional subject knowledge. I can tell you why this is. It is because when I see something that interests me, or I don't understand, I look it up and try and understand it. We have, at our fingertips, the greatest intellectual resource ever invented. And what do we use it for? Pictures of funny animals and selfies. Use it! Find out things. Stuff. Anything. Learn. Enjoy the process of learning. Allow yourself the luxury of becoming more knowledgeable. One day I wanted to find out about Locks. I don't know why. I just was curious. Amazing things river rocks. Raising boats up, lowering them down. Fascinating. Now I know about locks. I know about how they're built, about that sometimes you need a lock that raises boats so high that they have to go in a little box, called a caisson. The biggest one of these, incidentally, is in Belgium, and lifts boats 73 metres. Now, that's probably not that interesting to any of you but it is to me. I love the fact that we, as humans, designed and built these structures and I adore finding out how they work. In a lot of ways it does not matter what you are interested in but it matters to be interested because that pursuit, that need to know about something is what could make you an exceptional person.

Every year, about this time, year eleven students come up to me and ask whether they should do AS English next year and, in general, I ask them all the same question. That question is 'What are you reading at the moment?' And every single one of them who tells me they're not reading anything gets the same response: 'You shouldn't do English.' This seems harsh, yes, but there is no point in doing a subject that does not interest you. There is no point in doing something that you do not care about. Most of the students I deter are trying to do the subject because they think it is a wise choice, or a good option or it'll look good on their CVs. I tell them to thing about what it is they want to do. I tell them to go and be masters of their own futures, to follow their interests, to try and find things to pursue, and fail, and eventually succeed at. And I tell you, in closing this assembly, that it doesn't matter if you aren't ablt to do it now. It only matters if you find something easy. Go out there and find something that you can't do. Because it's not that you can't do it. Don't say to yourself I can't do this.

Tell yourself:

I can't do this YET.

Thank you."

I was actually quite proud of myself that day. I'm not entirely sure my line manager was though. If you are interested in booking me to come and speak to your disillusioned youth,  I can also do balloon animals. Requests to @calamityteacher

I have some sad news.

A few weeks ago a student from my school in year seven died of an existing, although not obviously fatal, illness. It wasn't an unusual illness, it wasn't anything special, and, unfortunately, for a child to die, although increasingly rare, is not a strange thing to happen. For the microcosm of the schoolyard, however, it is catastrophic. And quite rightly so.

Being a teacher is not a job in many senses. I know I said that it is a job in my last post but there are many parts of the occupation that fail to free themselves from the intricacies of normal life. Profoundly we are grounded by our emotions and by our, often reluctant, feelings of genuine care for our charges.

I have had a lot of difficulty in even getting this far in this blog post and I think this is because it is difficult to have a purpose to it. My anonymity prevents eulogy and the gravitas hobbles humour. And who would I be, anyway, to make light of death except through the sort of self-defence mechanism that is truly English in its nationality.

Perhaps, then, instead of trying to comment about it. Instead of trying to be pithy and plaintive and pundamentalist I should just be narrative. It was announced by the head teacher in morning briefing. It is probably one of the only times that I have ever genuinely heard a sharp intake of breath from a gathered crowd. People actually exclaimed. The child was well-known and popular, although that makes nothing more or less sad, and they had been well-known for helping around the community. I knew the child in a diminutive kind of way we had occasionally spoken, once during one of their outside school events. But that personal touch does not really matter because it is not whether the child is known to you or not that creates the impact of an event like this because there is always a personal touch.

I said to one of my colleagues at the time that it would not be the first few days that would be the most difficult but it would be the weeks afterwards when little things refuse to go away and some of the students found that memories cannot be cast off as easily as a filled-up exercise book. I didn't realise how right I was.

I will segue here. I return to that blissful, carefree summer when I left school myself. A boy from my year died. He went swimming at a party in a lake at the end of one of his friends' gardens and he got into trouble and died. A tragedy. Some years later the friend whose house it was would commit suicide. I do not know, and probably no-one really will, whether the two incidents were linked. I knew the two boys, but not well. The news spread as a virus through computers then, in a summer when people were spread a little thinner than they had been when they attended regular lessons but a lot thicker than, well, now. It was with a strange sense of deja vu that I watched the wave of despair spread across the school in front of my own eyes. It had the memory of a moment of remembrance at a celebration assembly for A-level results. A moment of watching a parent collect a brown envelope for a child who couldn't and then a gulp in the throat years later, hearing, second hand, out of date news.

I retold the story of my own sixth form to my students and I told them that, if there was anything to learn, it is that you must always talk about your feelings. You must talk about grief because it is different for everyone.

I will segue again. This time to a seminar on child protection. I have difficulty placing this one. It may have been at university or it may have been at NQT induction but I remember (probably only slightly erroneously) being told by a CP officer that it is always when you have the least time that the most important things come up. For the most part the legacy of grief in the school has subsided but, and I painfully recounted my own words in my head that it would take a while for the real issues to appear from the albeit painful malaise of potentially mass hysteria, it was with genuine concern that I found myself sat across from a student of mine who had changed. They had come to me on a full day of teaching, after a horrifically stressful lesson with the year ten class who were only spared expletives by a few millimetres of bitten lip, and they needed my help more than anyone I have ever taught.

I don't know how many of you have ever had a student sit down and really open up to you but it is the most difficult things that can happen because of the first thing that you have to say. Legally, Ethically and correctly the first thing you have to say are the words the student probably least wants to hear: 'I will have to tell someone else that you are telling me this.' And it is then that their eyes drop. It has happened to me twice. And both times I have had the thought running through my mind that I am not a psychiatrist but this child, this fragile little creature that is just a perfect incidence of everything that is right with the world believes that I am, or perhaps doesn't believe but they need me to be so much that they may as well have bought me a professional qualification to nail to the wall. Being a teacher is not being a teacher. Being a teacher is being a conduit through which a child can access anything without fear of judgement, without fear of pain, or ramification and with, overall, the sense of hope that you will be exactly the perfect thing that they need. It is quite stunning how many teachers know about teenage pregnancies before the grandparents, or father. I told this student the words. I told them that I would have to tell someone and I did and I did so knowing that, in all likelihood, this student would not trust me again. And I am proud of this because, when I saw them walking out of a session with the school councilor and ed psych a few days ago I knew that this was the best thing for them and that they would be alleviated of the thoughts that refused to leave their mind free of harassment. 

I am proud of myself because I know that I did the right thing. I know that I have helped through knowing that I am fallible in my own ability. That I know that even when my day is terrible I always have time to see a student. Because a cup of tea and a biscuit are not always the reason we have breaktimes.

It has taken me too long to write this post, and it is so short. And I can't bear to profread it. And even now I cannot help but steal phrases from Vonnegut to fill in the gaps of my own expression. It is so short.

So it goes.

No Disentegrations.

I received a strange little call a couple of days ago. It's one of those calls that a little, arrogant, part of every teacher fetishises and wishes would come true. I received a call offering me a job. The unusual part? I never applied for it.

Corporate headhunting is nothing new, but it is still a surprise for one such as me (ie. More useless than individuality at a PIXL conference.(perhaps that's unfair. If you are offended by that read it as 'more useless than Gove.) I'm not amazing, and I probably don't care quite enough to be truly exceptional. What struck me as particularly strange about the call was how insistent it was. The Headteacher of the school seeking to recruit very average staff was on a Wolf of Wall Street hard sell and there was no doubting it. In a ten minute call I pretty much only spoke to confirm my name and place of residence. They offered me a lot of tacit promises and *wink wink nudge nudge* style incentives. I was a bit shocked. It seemed too much. When I asked, finally, at the end of the conversation (lecture) about who they had heard about me from, the Head refused to tell me. At this point I became deeply suspicious and put on my Poirot mustache just in case.

So I went and had a little look see on the interbobs and did a little bit of digging. It took me and a colleague approximately 38 seconds to discover how they'd heard of me; a member of staff from my current school was acting as a named consultant for those at the the school that wanted to be my next. I was appalled. It is a needless and horrifying lack of morality based around the faux-competitive nature of educational establishments. It may not come as a surprise to many that the school that was out for the bounty on my unkempt and permanently sleep-deprived head was a new build school backed by a corporate entity. I think the delivery of money into education is great, but it seems to be some sort of proviso that any injection has to come with the slowly corrupting HIV of corporate ethics. We are the front line blind bunnies of the state's rabid hop into bed with a myxomatosis ridden publicly limited cash-slut. There is no philanthropy in this. The only philanthropy in education is the thankless, moneyless provision of free overtime given to students because it helps, or because that museum is only open on the weekend, or because without this bit of training, or coursework help, or equipment then they simply won't win, or learn or achieve.

Perhaps I am wrong. Perhaps I am a socialist wrapped in middle-class angora. Perhaps my problem is that I think education is about getting kids to learn stuff, then more stuff, then go into the world a better person. It's not, is it. It's about looking good and standing up in front of people with your shiny new school and saying "Look at what a fucking great human being I am." It's about companies who probably abuse child labour abroad backing schools so they can claim that they "Invest in Pupils' dreams" or some such assorted vacuous bollocks. It's about making TV shows that show what beautiful and fragile human beings teachers are and how difficult this job that we all chose to do is while producers and writers and broadcasters rub their little hands with glee. (Yeah the job's hard. We get it. We do it. We do it every day, every week of every, oh, wait, no. We get thirteen weeks holiday., which, when we're quite honest with ourselves, is lovely. It is a job and I enjoy it and I want to do it; this is a rarity in the world. I enjoy that I feel that the work I do is actually of some significance to the world around me.) It worries me that the education sector is just another way of bargaining for cash and reputation and status in an already morally bankrupt world.

So, to sort of return to the story, I informed those higher up in the educational foodchain that I had been headhunted for a different school by a member of my own who has a vested interest and a moral compass about as useful as a dildo in a nunnery. I have yet to see any action, and in all likelihood it will all be brushed under the carper and then liberally assaulted with a dyson so that the school can maintain its exact current reputation. I would much rather it took a stand and put into the public domain the high moral stance that it could take by exposing and chastising this sort of practice. We should not accept this in education. I think we forget sometimes; it doesn't matter what school you work at as long as you can do your job and in that job you are accountable only to children and yourself. Not money, not OFSTED, not whichever company owns your building. You are a teacher. Be proud of doing what you do.